The Value of User ID

How much do you think your data is worth? Take a minute — think about it.

Most of us mistakenly believe that only prominent figures like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg need to worry about information theft. For this reason, we can hardly be bothered to care about privacy, the websites we visit, or phishing emails.

You’ve certainly lost track of the number of times you’ve submitted personal info to various websites. And with good reason!

Blind trust in automated systems

Our increasingly fast-paced world is seeing most of our financial transactions get automated . Instead of leaving home, we often prefer to key in our credit card details and order deliveries straight to the living room. Given the convenience, we’ve become quite quick to trust the security of these online stores.

With that in mind, how much thought have you actually given to the security measures of these sites? The reality is hackers are always on the prowl to exploit loopholes in the system, and we’ve seen major brands come under serious attack as evidence.

The recent Facebook fiasco is a good example, but that’s just one drop in a sea of security breaches. In September 2017, for instance, 143 million Americans and 44 million Britons lost their data from credit rating firm Equifax.

The worth of your data

Your identity is as valuable to hackers as your physical assets are to you. Depending on the type of information stolen, they can either use it to rob you or sell it for cash.

To dive deeper, a hacked mobile account in the United States sells at a minimum of $14 (and such sales occur quite frequently). Further details of personal data sales are even more alarming:

• Commercial account details can go for anywhere between $20 to $500, depending on the amount in the account.
• Your PayPal or eBay account with significant transaction history will sell for $300.
• Your personal identifiable information like legal name, address, date of birth, and even social security number sells at $1 per line.
• Full credit reports can be bought at $25 apiece.
• Documents like passport and driver’s license are sold for $10 to $35 each.

Hopefully by now you see that data theft is no joke to hackers.

It’s important we find stringent means to protect our identities as the IoT (Internet of Things) continues to become the mainstream channel for information sharing. In fact, we are entering a data age, as the web is filled with arrays of information treated as data.

As such, we need to find better ways to protect this data relative to the subpar conventional security measures currently being bypassed and exploited.

Conclusion: The solution lies in Blockchain

Globally, billions of pieces of data — including our personal identity details! — flow across the web everyday. And internet hackers are continually figuring out clever ways to hack information databases.

To that effect, it’s high time we turned to data technologies such as Blockchain.

Blockchain does not work like a conventional database technology that is centralized and thus a target for internet theft. With blockchain, data is decentralized and heavily encrypted; the information you key into the database is not what you see on the other end.

The encrypted information comes out as a unique code of letters and figures known as a ‘Hash’. A Hash looks unintelligible — something like “0fe46528541f4735613b9be29ecea9b6” — to covert represent information passed from the user-end. All the data in the database is hashed, which literally means that your data has its own unique code which a hacker cannot decipher.

For security’s sake, it’s vital that Blockchain Technology be deployed in every sector to ensure that data is protected from hackers.

About Clears

Clears aims to be the standard KYC in the rapidly growing ICOs, Fintech and Cryptocurrency marketplaces, expanding to serve all industries that require identity checks and KYC processing. We are confident that users will specifically request that Clears processes their KYCs due to its convenience and enhanced security.

Learn more at http://clea.rs/

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